Sandy, Google, Harvard, Twitter, More: Morning Buzz, November 1, 2012

Interesting article about a Willamette professor’s research into how Google personalizes search results. “Based on what Google thought it knew about the users, the types of results were remarkably different, Davisson says. For example, while some people were shown biographical information about [Michele] Bachmann, others were prompted to search for her in conjunction with words like ‘joke,’ ‘naked’ and ‘lies.'”

The World Digital Library has added the Florentine Codex, according to this press release from the Library of Congress. “The text is in Spanish and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Its 12 books, richly illustrated by indigenous artists, cover the Aztec religion and calendar, economic and social life, Aztec history and mythology, the use of plants and animals and the Spanish conquest as seen through the eyes of the native Mexicans”

Facebook is apparently rolling out an option for fans to specify that they want notification when a page updates. A step in the right direction, but do you know how I make sure I get all the updates from a page I really like? Grab the RSS feed from the fan page and chunk it in my feed reader — I don’t even bother with Facebook itself at all.

From MIT, a new algorithim that predicts trending topics on Twitter in advance. “At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student, Stanislav Nikolov, will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before.”